Ramster, Gail and Bichard, Jo-Anne, 2014, Other, The Great British Public Toilet Map Royal College of Art, London.
Abstract or Description: | The Great British Public Toilet Map (TGBPTM) is an open dataset of 12000+ publicly accessible toilets in the UK, accessed through an online interface. It allows people to find location and accessibility information, and to add, edit and remove data (crowd-sourcing). National toilet data was last collected in 2001 (Audit Commission: 5959 toilets in England) with public toilet data fragmented across 406 councils. A subset of councils (81) produce open data. Since 2008 provision has become far more diverse, devolved and privatised, as ‘publicly-accessible’ toilets. Datasets created by online information-mining, available open data or crowd-sourcing have been ineffective or become obsolete. Ramster developed a three-pronged methodology recognising the strengths of these methods in combination, to create a national dataset of publicly-accessible toilets that elicits ongoing updates from providers and users. She was awarded £20K by Nominet Trust (now Social Tech Fund) to develop her methodology which revealed 9000+ toilets when the website launched (Nov 2014), and a grant from Open Data Institute (2016) to analyse her data for regional inequalities in provision. Ramster was invited to present on her application and creation of open data to meet a public need by the Open Data Institute (2014), Geomob (2014) and OpenTech (2015) conferences. In 2016 she was a finalist (with Bichard) for TGBPTM in the ESRC Outstanding Impact in Society Awards and BT Tech4Good competition. Several local authorities have contributed and/or link to TGBPTM data. This applied research creating an open dataset builds on previous work of the same name (TGBPTM pilot, 2011-2014) that gathered public demand for digitised public service information (local open data), an output of TACT3 (2009-2012). In 2018, with Bichard and developers Neontribe, Ramster set-up Public Convenience Ltd; a spin-out from the RCA to sustain and develop TGBPTM for public and commercial applications. |
---|---|
Official URL: | https://www.toiletmap.org.uk |
Subjects: | Creative Arts and Design > W200 Design studies > W280 Interactive and Electronic Design |
School or Centre: | Research Centres > Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design |
Funders: | Nominet Trust |
Date Deposited: | 04 Feb 2019 11:23 |
Last Modified: | 23 May 2025 11:53 |
URI: | https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/3758 |
![]() |
Edit Item (login required) |